Story Book Summer Guest Post

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I am excited to be taking part in the Story Book summer over at Rainy Day Mum. We have been big fans of Barefoot Books since discovering their fun YouTube channel filled with song versions of their great books. For Skyler's birthday last month I bought him some of our favorites.

This version of A Hole in the Bottom of the Sea was a fun way to tie in an activity with his new water table that was another birthday gift.

Check out the full post and tutorial at Rainy Day Mum here.

Good Night Animals Match Game

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Apparently we have really needed some little animal guys around our house! Skyler loves animals and we are constantly reading books about animals. Earlier in the week I shared this Big Red Barn inspired small world play, and today I am going to show you our activity interpretation of another favorite book of ours - Good Night, Gorilla by Peggy Rathmann.

Skyler has been asking for this book a lot lately, and often I will walk into his room to see him reading it on his own. He even says "Good night, dear," and says good night to all of the animals, the lion being his favorite. It just melts my mama heart!

For this activity I used several animals from both the Wild and North American Wildlife Toob sets. I used the animals that could be found in the book, that Skyler knows well, or ones that can be seen at our zoo, which is why I picked a combination from the sets.

To create our match game, I took pictures of the animal figurines against a roll of white paper, printed them off and cut them out. I have always wanted to make Skyler a match game using this method and was intimidated, but it was actually quite easy!

I picked out the three animals from the story that we had - gorilla, lion, and giraffe - and set them out for Skyler. We had just read through the book, so I asked if he wanted to put his animals to sleep. He picked up the gorilla and set it down on the matching picture.

After matching the giraffe and lion and letting him play for a few minutes, I asked if he wanted more animals to match. I added three new animals for him to match.

He quickly matched his tiger, elephant, and moose, so I added three more animals.

Skyler loved the crocodile and matched it over and over! Hearing him say good night to the crocodile was adorable, so I was happy that he wanted to play with that one repeatedly :)

Skyler took a break to read his book, so I took the figurines off the pictures and reorganized them so he could try all nine at once. I only put out the nine total, even though I printed fourteen. Eventually I might give him all animals at once, but for awhile I will stick to just a few at a time.

This was a lot harder for him, but he did eventually get all of the animals sorted. The hardest for him to distinguish were the camel and moose. A very similar color and both with strange things on the tops of their bodies!

I knew Skyler would enjoy this match game, but I was a little surprised just how much he liked it, and also at how well he did at distinguishing the animals. He happily sat and sorted his animals, sometimes saying good night, always telling me what he had or what color it was. He also liked holding two animals together and saying "they huggin'!" which cracked me up!

If you have animal figurines around or if you have thought about getting some, you have to try this activity! It was so simple to put together and a lot of fun - Skyler can vouch for it! ;)

 

Big Red Barn Play

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I got Skyler some animal figurines for his Easter basket. He is getting to an age where I think he will love small world play, and I was so excited when I found the Toob Farm animal set at Michael's! Skyler loves the book Big Red Barn by Margaret Wise Brown and this fun sensory activity was a great way to provide Skyler with a hands on activity based on the book he enjoys so much!

I spread our green St. Paddy's Day Dough on half of a cookie sheet, and filled the other half with coffee grounds to make grass and mud, and then all I needed was our big red barn. I looked for images of a barn, and loved this one from Learn Create Love. I didn't use the printable, I just looked at the image and drew it, but the printable is a great option! I stuck the barn in our play dough "grass" and added some farm animals. It was a perfect morning to play with this, because Skyler had been asking to play with play dough!

When Skyler saw this activity he got so excited! He touched the coffee grounds and said "coffee" quietly as he ran it through his fingers. I especially loved it because it smelled SO good!

Skyler's favorite thing to do was pick up handfuls of coffee grounds, and pile them onto the play dough. His play grass ended up looking like our poor backyard after this winter - one huge mud pit! 

Skyler used the pile of coffee grounds to feed the animals. I think he was remembering the "baby chicks eating!!" that we saw this weekend. The little rooster got a ton of coffee grounds :)

Taking a break from feeding his animals to feel the coffee. 

 Time to feed the dog.

And of course, the cow was hungry too. This was right after Skyler ate a bite of coffee grounds. His reaction was pretty hilarious. I think he is still trying to get them out in the first picture. He didn't try to eat any after that!

We also had fun rolling balls of play dough and coffee grounds making little speckled eggs.

As we played, I read Skyler the Big Red Barn and he told me about the animals he had that were also in the book. It was a lot of fun, and I know Skyler will be asking for more coffee grounds to feed his little animals all the time!

 

A Chubby Little Snowman

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It is no secret that Skyler LOVES his ECFE class! I have posted pictures and another craft inspired by the wonderful program we are in. This week we had a pajama day, and Skyler was so thrilled to be in class he could hardly decide what he wanted to do - so much to choose from! He ended up going down the slide a lot, putting "Pom poms!!!" in a muffin tin and through paper towel rolls, and trying out the easel for the first time! They also had play dough with rolling pins and chalk/construction paper to experiment with. It is a favorite time of the week for both of us!

We start the class with thirty minutes of play time/parent interaction and then do a fifteen minute circle time with songs and rhymes before we leave the room for the separation and parent education half of the class! This activity is based on a rhyme we have done in circle time the past few weeks. "A Chubby Little Snowman" was a new rhyme for me, and Skyler really enjoys it - he loves both snowmen and bunnies, so it is a win all around for my little guy.

The rhyme goes like this:

A chubby little snowman,

Had a carrot nose.

Along came a bunny,

And what do you suppose?

That hungry little bunny,

Looking for its lunch,

Ate the snowman's carrot nose -

Nibble nibble crunch!

After seeing this sandpaper and felt matching game from No Time For Flashcards, I have been more motivated to make a felt board for Skyler. I see them a lot and like the idea of using felt on felt, but I loved the idea of felt on sandpaper and being able to draw underneath the shapes! When we started this rhyme in ECFE, the two ideas merged in my head and I was ready to start working on this simple and fun puzzle to bring a little bit of our beloved class home!

To start our board, I traced a picture of a rabbit that I had printed onto the grey felt (I just did a Google search for "cartoon rabbit" and this is just the outline/back of the image since it is not mine). Then once it was cut out, I flipped it over onto it's place on the sand paper.

Then I knew what size of a snowman I could make. I went around to find some circle shapes that would work for that leftover space. Our coffee corner came to the rescue with a small coffee cup (the larger opening made the bottom circle and the bottom of the cup made the center circle!) and the mini measure we use for our espresso machine was perfect for the top circle!

Once the snowman shape was cut out, I made a hat and scarf out of the black and teal felt, as well as eyes for both the bunny and the snowman, and ears and a nose for the bunny. I made a bunch of carrot shapes out of the orange felt at the same time. 

Starting to look like a snowman and bunny!

I used my hot glue gun to attach the hat, eyes, inner ears, scarf, and nose, and left the carrots unglued. I also added color to the bunny nose and ears with red crayon and used a sharpie to give it more features. To give our rabbit the ability to eat that snowman's carrot nose, I cut a hole in the grey felt for the mouth!

To finish our felt board, I traced the snowman and the bunny on the sandpaper with crayon, added a simple background and then stapled the sandpaper to a canvas so it could stand (I also cut the mouth out on the sandpaper and canvas at this time! I wrote the rhyme on the back of the canvas and our felt puzzle and activity board was complete!

Having the outlines and removable felt pieces makes for a puzzle aspect to this activity!

Skyler didn't notice this right away when he came down from his nap, so I walked over to the table while saying the rhyme, putting a carrot on the snowman's face and then picking it off and putting it through the mouth of the bunny and he was very intrigued, running right over to the table to play!

Skyler started off by feeding the bunny many carrots, and then after awhile he gave the snowman a nose as well! I didn't notice that Skyler was completely blurry (luckily, the board is well focused!) while taking these, but here are his first moments playing with the felt board. So far, he has not decided to take the felt pieces off, but has spent all of his time using the carrot cut outs to play!

For older children, using the plate holder would work really well. It is nice to have the picture upright, but Skyler kept knocking it over accidentally when he would try to feed the pieces through the hole. This was another reason why I attached the sandpaper to the canvas in the first place, both so it would stand well in the plate holder and so the felt pieces would have some space to go when the canvas was down flat! At this point, we just laid the canvas down on the table and then it was much easier to play.

The way that Skyler has his hands back in the second picture shows what he does whenever he does something he is excited about - it is so stinkin' cute. He will smile and let out a happy squeal and pull his hands back. He does this often, not just with this activity! If he brings me a book and I take it from him, asking if he wants to read it, he will pull his arms back like that and smile, running off to wherever he wants to sit to read the book :)

After awhile, he had been putting the carrots either on the face of the snowman or the mouth of the bunny, then I asked if he could give the snowman a bellybutton, or give the snowman some hair, and this is how he responded!

After putting the carrots in silly places, he went back through and fed them all to the bunny!

This was so much fun to bring a little piece of our class to home. I liked how Skyler spent about equal time placing the carrots on the snowman and feeding them to the rabbit. We talked about the rhyme a lot while playing, and he enjoyed using the pieces to go along with the story.